Yahoo! announced Yahoo! oneConnect, available in Yahoo! Go 3.0 and Yahoo!’s new mobile home page in Q2 2008.
“Last year we set out to reinvent mobile search with Yahoo! oneSearch, and today with 29 operator partnerships around the world covering more than 600 million subscribers, we believe we have certainly succeeded,” said Marco Boerries, executive vice president, Connected Life, Yahoo!. “Now, we intend to reinvent mobile communications through Yahoo! oneConnect, a revolutionary new mobile communications service that will combine integrated mobile messaging with a socially-connected address book.”
Yahoo! oneConnect will be the first mobile product with an open architecture that aggregates communications tools - email, instant messaging (IM), text messaging (SMS), and social networks - for a new level of convenience in mobile communications.
Yahoo! oneConnect is designed to include the following features, which will:
— Socially-connected address book - Provide users the capability to integrate activity from popular social networks, professional networks, and communities into their address book, keeping it always in sync. Consumers will be able to view status updates, photo uploads, and the recent activity (“pulse”) of contacts across all their networks.
— Integrated mobile messaging - Offer seamless integration of IM and SMS, including threaded conversations. Any messaging service will be able to use Yahoo! oneConnect’s open APIs to plug into the application’s messaging feature - enabling consumers to access a wide range of popular services, such as Yahoo! Messenger, Google(R) Talk, AOL(R) Instant Messenger and MSN(TM) Messenger.
— Status - Give consumers the capability to view their contacts by their most recent status updates on popular social networks, as well as update their own status on their favorite social networks - in one easy step - and automatically broadcast it to their friends.
— Pulse - Provide consumers the functionality to see a dynamic overview of what friends are up to, including recent photos, their status, profile updates, and recommendations based on their most recent actions on popular social networks.
— Favorites - Keep the people consumers interact with most at their fingertips. Users will be able to set up messaging shortcuts to make reaching out as quick as possible.
— Social contact card - Allow users to aggregate the most relevant information on any given contact, including archives of past communications, detailed pulse history, and one-click ways to initiate communication.
— Innovative location-sensing technology - Provide new ways to locate, chat with, and exchange contact information with nearby Yahoo! oneConnect users. Proximity alerts will notify consumers when a contact enters their vicinity.
— An open communications platform - Give users the functionality to communicate via multiple communications tools - such as IM, SMS, and social networks. Widgets will provide users the capability to access their email across major email providers, such as Yahoo! Mail, MSN Hotmail(R), Gmail(R), and AOL(R) Mail. Additionally, Yahoo! is in discussions with DataViz(R), a company that allows mobile users to access their corporate Microsoft Exchange(TM) email accounts and Microsoft Office(TM), documents, to work together on widget versions of its industry-acclaimed RoadSynch(R) and Documents To Go(R) applications.
After its release, Yahoo! oneConnect is expected to become available across hundreds of devices and mobile browsers around the world.
Visit the Yahoo! booth at Mobile World Congress to see Yahoo! oneConnect - 7B26, Hall 7. For more information on Yahoo! oneConnect, go to http://mobile.yahoo.com/oneconnect. Screenshots of Yahoo! oneConnect as well as Yahoo!’s complete Mobile World Congress 2008 press kit can be found at http://mobile.yahoo.com/newsroom.